


Burn

by banshee_in_the_dark



Series: Ignite Series [3]
Category: Teen Wolf (TV)
Genre: Banshee Lydia Martin, Banshee Powers, Banshee Pregnancy, Drama, Emotional Tether(s), F/M, Future Fic, Hurt/Comfort, Light Angst, Romance
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-09-18
Updated: 2014-09-18
Packaged: 2018-02-17 20:46:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,198
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2322632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/banshee_in_the_dark/pseuds/banshee_in_the_dark
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Some sparks burn the brightest.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Burn

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you all so much for your lovely comments and kudos and likes and generally good vibes! We have only one more part to go before this series is completed, and I couldn't have done it without your support. I plan to post it before Sunday so keep your eyes open ;)
> 
> I hope you enjoy this installment and that some of your questions are answered.

It takes her a moment to put a name to the face looming over her when she wakes up.

“Melissa?” she asks, limbs heavy like lead as Lydia lifts her arm and touches her hand to her pounding head.

No, she corrects herself. Not pounding. In fact, she felt no pain just the uncomfortable sensation of having her skull filled with cotton, dulling her senses and her thoughts. It was also quiet, so much so that it scared her. The last thing she remembers is a wailing she’s come too familiar with in the last couple of weeks piercing her eardrums and splitting her head.

“Take it easy sweetheart,” Melissa coos, fingers wrapping around Lydia’s wrist and gently dragging her arm back. “You’ve been unconscious for almost half an hour. Any longer and we would’ve had to take you to the emergency room.”

Lydia groans. For someone who works closely with medical professionals, she’s no fan of hospitals.

“I know,” Melissa chuckles. “We weren’t really looking forward to explaining what happened to you since we don’t understand it ourselves.”

Her eyes pierce into Lydia’s, a warm brown identical to Scott’s. The affection and worry is evident there, honest, clouded by nothing, not judgment, not a hint of accusation. She doesn’t ask ‘why did you nearly kill yourself?’ and Lydia is thankful. There is no easy answer to that question, not when she doesn’t _know_ herself and what she suspects… The thought turns her stomach.  

She sits up slowly with Melissa’s help. The older woman eyes her inquisitively. “I’m fine,” she assures her. “Stiles?”

“I sent him downstairs. His pacing was driving me nuts.”

“It’s a gift he has,” she attempts a joke, smiling at the woman she’s come to think of as her second mother. “Can you tell him to go home and get me some clothes? I want to take a shower.”

“You can borrow something from me,” Melissa offers.

Lydia shakes her head. “Thank you, but I’d really feel more comfortable in my own clothes.”

Melissa’s eyes narrow the tiniest bit. “Are you sure you’re fine?”

“I am, I promise. I’m not going to drown in the shower.”

Melissa gives her a single stare. _Don’t joke about this young lady._

“Okay,” she concedes after a moment. “Sure you don’t want to see him before he leaves?”

“He’s probably beyond freaking out and to be perfectly honest so am I,” Lydia purses her lips. “The drive will help him calm down. When we inevitably freak out together I’d prefer to be dressed and not have shampoo on my hair.”

This time Melissa does smile. “Alright then. There’s clean towels on the top shelve beside the sink.”

With that she leaves the room. Scott’s old room, actually. Lydia stands on shaky legs and carefully pads towards the bathroom, shutting and locking the door behind her.

The towels are where Melissa indicated, but it’s the lower shelves that Lydia focuses her attention on. A few months ago Melissa broke her leg in three parts so Scott and Kira stayed here to provide around the clock assistance and only recently went back home to their apartment. Lydia quietly shuffles perfume bottles and aftershave and moisturizers, looking for something in particular. They left a lot of stuff behind.  It’s no secret that Scott and Kira want to have a baby, have for quite some time actually, but with no result. Kira’s mother suggested it was because wolves and foxes don’t get along and therefore crossbreeding might not be possible, but they still hold out hope.

With a flutter of excitement, Lydia finally lays eyes on the item she was looking for and takes it in her hand. She stands before the sink, studiously ignoring her reflection. She opens the box and curls her fingers around the wand.

She’s never taken a pregnancy test before. She’s always been very conscious of the risks of sexual activity and made sure she was always safe. Even with Stiles who she’s been with for seven years and counting, they never became lax on the matter of birth control.

The instructions are very clear and easy to follow. Soon she’s back before the sink, staring at the little wand as the required time tickles by. Her phone would’ve been appreciated at this point to properly time the test, but she makes do.

The two plus signs are faint but clearly distinguishable. Her stomach drops to somewhere in the vicinity of her knees and a particularly striking form of quiet panic trickles through her veins.

* * *

Stiles makes it back to Melissa’s in record time, a change of clothes for Lydia haphazardly thrown inside a bag slung over his shoulder. Melissa hands him two steaming mugs of hot cocoa before he climbs the stairs, extracting a promise to make Lydia drink hers at all costs.

He takes the steps in twos and bursts through the door of what he still thinks as Scott’s room, anxious energy coursing like electricity through him. He makes a conscious effort to calm down and _breathe_ as he contemplates the closed door of the bathroom and the sound of the shower fills his ears.

He tries the knob, not exactly surprised to find it locked but anger surges within him all the same. Why is she keeping him out?

“Lyds?” he knocks on the door, softly.

“I’ll be out in minute!”

 _Fuck. That._ She’s been acting strange for the last couple of weeks, nearly drowned an hour ago and now she’s keeping a locked door between them? _No._

Stiles grips the knob on his sweaty palm and simultaneously pulls the door towards him and lifts it up. With a soft click the lock gives away. Scott always complained when they were younger that the lock was shit and Stiles had quickly learned how to disable it.

The warm steam seeps through his clothes, making them cling uncomfortably to his skin. He hears Lydia’s long-suffering sigh after she turns the shower off and slaps the curtain open. Stiles crosses the small space, his sneakers annoyingly noisy against the tiled floor, and hands her a thick white towel from the small stack atop the shelf. He starts to say something to her but his brain freezes when his eyes fall on the plastic wand sitting innocently by the sink.

He picks up the pregnancy test with a shaky hand. “Lydia? Are you…?”

His voice trail in the silence. His heartbeat speeds and he blames his shortness of breath on the heavy steam of the shower. The corners of Lydia’s mouth curl downwards and she grips the towel protectively around her.

“Yeah,” she finally says. “I’m pregnant.”

He’s on her in a second, one arm secured around her waist, fingers threading through the strands of her dripping hair, kisses landing on every inch of her face he can reach and loving words unintelligible to his own ears rolling off his tongue. It takes him a moment to notice that she’s tense and unresponsive in his arms and not exactly thrilled by the news.

“What?” he asks, stubbornly refusing to put space between them even as Lydia gently pushes him away.

“It’s just –” she won’t meet his eyes. Alarm bells ring in his ears. That’s never a good sign. “I don’t think this is a good thing.”

“Why?” he sputters. He knows a baby right now wasn’t exactly in their plans – hell, he’s still working up the courage to propose to her – but they _have_ talked about it. Being together for so long, planning to share their life, the subject of children came up a few times. They want them, yes, when the time is right, but if it happened before that, well then they’d make do. They were always on the same page about that.

Except now it happened and they aren’t.

“I felt when it happened,” she furrows her brow. “It was the night you almost died and you brought me back. I can’t quite explain it – I can’t even understand it myself – but I felt this spark and warmth and I just knew.”

Stiles swallowed, his excitement quickly dying. “Lyds,” he rubs her arms soothingly. “That was two weeks ago,” he says carefully. “There’s no way you could know…” the glare she shoots him stops him right on his tracks and he quickly changes tactics. “…and if you did it’s still too soon to know for sure.”

“The test was positive.”

“And they’re not infallible. Scott and Kira had some false positives remember? And her doctor said it could be caused by stress –”

“I’m not stressed!” Lydia pushes past him and into the bedroom. She drops the towel and angrily pulls the sweats from the bag on the bed. “Ever since that night I’ve heard babies crying nonstop and doing crazy things like redecorating your office and buying diapers and pre-ordering a crib set–”

“What,” he asks flatly.

“– and tonight I blacked out and tried to kill myself. _It_ made try to kill myself.”

“No,” he denies, the haunting sight of her in that bathtub flashing before his eyes. “You didn’t –”

“Why else would I lay flat in the tub with my legs out and the water running?” she sits on the corner of the bed, droplets falling from the tips of her hair and drenching the tank top she pulled over her head. Her hands cup her knees in a white-knuckled grip and her head falls forward hiding her face from him. “This baby is bad news. I can feel it.”

“I don’t accept that,” he snaps, surprising himself with the severity laced in his words.

Lydia stares at him, sad. “Stiles,” she shakes her head. “You know how my powers work. All I ever hear is death and danger and now our baby. You know what that means.”

“The only thing I know is that I love you more than anything in this world and if you’re right, if you are pregnant, then there’s no way in hell our baby would try to hurt you. Lydia,” he kneels before her, takes her cold hands between his and laces their fingers. “This baby is a product of love. It’s not bad news,” he smiles, brings her hands up and places a kiss on the back of both of them. “It’s actually the best news you could ever give me.”

Fat tears stream down her cheeks but she does smile.

“There has to be another explanation for what happened tonight,” he assures her, making a mental note to hit up every contact in his emissary address book to that end. “All the other stuff, the crib, the diapers, having BabyTV on the background while you cook, hell, even redecorating my office and throwing away my stuff, those are _good things_. Tonight was an anomaly. Before you blacked out you said ‘they’ wanted to take him away and ‘they’ knew. Do you remember that?” she shakes her head. “Well, maybe ‘they’ are the real danger, not the baby.”

“What about the crying?” she asks through a sniffle.

“Babies cry all the time,” he shrugs. “Maybe you can hear it because the baby is going to be a banshee like you.”

Lydia shakes her head. “I said _him_ , Stiles. It’s a boy,” Stiles elected to not question her statement and instead just nodded. “Male banshees don’t exist.”

“But you’re different from other banshees,” he stresses. “Maybe you can produce male offspring with banshee abilities.”

Her eyes flutter close and she nervously licks her lips. “I’m scared,” Lydia admits.

“Me too. But I’m not gonna let fear take away the happiness of this moment.”

“You’re really happy?”

“Are you kidding me? You’re having our baby Lydia,” he cups her face, gazing into her eyes. “I love you so much.”

“I love you too.”

The kiss was a wet mess and Stiles could taste the salty hint of her tears on her lips. Lydia clung to him.

Excitement bubbles in his stomach. He regularly makes it a point to _not_ underestimate Lydia’s powers, but feeling the precise moment of conception of their child? Being able to hear him even though he’s nothing more than a minuscule cluster of cells snugly safe in her womb? Color him impressed. “Can you hear him right now?”

She nods against his neck. “It started again in the shower. I’ve been trying to ignore it.”

An idea strikes him. “Maybe you shouldn’t,” he suggests.

“What do you mean?”

“Well, babies cry for a reason right? What if he’s trying to tell you something? Maybe if you focus and try to listen not as a banshee, but as a mother, you’ll understand what he’s trying to say.”

“It’s not like he can talk,” Lydia frowns at him. He arches his brow in a look that says _seriously? You have a direct line to our fetus but MY idea is crazy?_ She rolls her eyes. “Fine,” she takes a deep breath and closes her eyes as she strains to hear.

Stiles waits anxiously, paying attention to every micro expression on her face. He detected the precise moment when she started to give up. “Lydia this is your son,” he urges. “You’re his mother. He’s trying to tell you something. What is it?”

A powerful shiver wreaks her. Stiles curls his hands around her shoulders and rubs them soothingly. “He’s scared. Oh god,” she sobs. “He’s so scared.”

“What is he afraid of?”

She shakes her head, eyes firmly shut and brow furrowed. “I can’t tell. But it’s close.”

“Okay,” Stiles scrambles his brains, thinking of what to do next. A pained expression falls upon Lydia’s features and Stiles aches to help her. “Can you soothe him somehow?”

The absurdity of trying to calm a fetus does not escape him, but it’s far less important than the very real worry and fear of the baby and Lydia’s wellbeing.

Lydia’s hand goes to rest flat against her flat belly. Following his instincts, Stiles cups her hand there too, feeling her skin warm under his.

“I think it’s working,” she breathes after a while, the lines on her forehead smoothing and a small, timid smile tugging at the corners of her lips.

Stiles presses a kiss to her brow and pulls her closer, fingers twined at her belly. Tomorrow he’d hit the books and talk to everyone who could help him to find out what was going on with Lydia and their baby, but for now he can just enjoy holding his family safe in his arms.

* * *

His research proves fruitless. Everything that can be known about banshees from books and bestiaries and google they already know it and the information doesn’t change no matter how many times he rereads it. The so called experts, emissaries that have been around the business longer than even Deaton, only have limited knowledge of banshees. They often don’t know all the facts themselves, everyone holding one piece of the puzzle wailing women are.

Banshees are rare. Banshees are mysterious. Secretive. Loners. They don’t pack, they don’t associate with other creatures. Most banshees don’t even know they are one, and on average they only experience two omens in their life. An emissary should consider him or herself lucky if they ever come briefly in contact with one, should heed her warning and part ways amicably.

To be honest, the more he reads the more Stiles starts to think they key is not in how banshees work, but how they _don’t_. The differences between Lydia and the lot of them are glaringly stark. That has to mean something.

He brings out the matter not with Lydia, but with Deaton and Morrell first. They’ve assembled a little bit of a task force of sorts to solve this mystery, much to Morrell dispassionate irritation. Her penchant for talking in riddles and the unclear history between her and Deaton make communication between the three trying at best, but they’re all making an effort to work together and Stiles appreciates it enough to overlook the thinly veiled recriminations and biting remarks they make about one another.

“Perhaps she’s not a banshee,” Morrell says mildly, looking out the window to the steadily falling rain.

“Jennifer and Peter seemed to think that.”

“A power hungry sociopath and a ritualistic murderer,” she sneers softly. “We better trust them.”

“Not to mention her grandmother was one too,” Stiles offers as he paces between them.

“Only on extremely rare occasions, and she dabbled more on pseudo-sciences than bestiaries.”

“If she’s not a banshee, then what is she? A kanima?”

“She’s more,” Deaton says, privately communicating with Morrell via staring. “That would be extremely rare,” he says cryptically.

She nods. “Even more so than a True Alpha.”

“And the chances of both of them coinciding geographically and at the same time would be absurdly low.”

“Perhaps we underestimated the power of the Nemeton.”

“What are you talking about?” Stiles asks impatiently, stopping his pacing.  

Morrell gives him a heavy lidded look. “There is a myth in Irish lore or an earth goddess who often symbolized imminent death but could be quite capricious and influence the outcome of war and the fate of individuals at her convenience,” Morrell crossed her arms over her chest, brow knitting delicately as she loses herself in her musings. “The myth says she’s the mother of banshees, that she carefully selected girls and bestowed very special powers upon them, making them roam the land doing her work`, whispering in their ears the names of those who were soon to die.”

“The Morrígan,” Deaton cut in dramatically.

Stiles merely glances from one to the other, unimpressed. “Are you seriously saying Lydia is a goddess reincarnated?”

“There have been accounts throughout the centuries, banshees who claimed they were the mouthpiece of the Morrígan and that they could channel her powers. Like suppressing a scream meant to end someone’s life,” Morrell said pointedly, arching an eyebrow at Stiles.

“None were confirmed though,” Deaton insists.

Stiles pinches the bridge of his nose, a dull ache pulsing steadily behind his left eye. “This still doesn’t explain what is going on with Lydia and why my unborn child is terrified.”

After a moment too long of continued silence, Stiles lifts his head and tears his eyes open, finding Deaton and Morrell giving him equally enigmatic stares.

“All banshees operate on a separate wavelength than humans,” Deaton starts warily. “They can hear the death.”

“Yes, I’m aware.”

“The dead can also communicate with them,” Morrell adds, returning to her spot by the window and turning her back to them once again. “If they know how.”

His headache becomes more pronounced and his blood stirs with panic. “Like Peter,” Stiles whispers, his voice gruff with dread.

“Yes. Exactly like Peter,” Deaton nods. “And if Lydia is a mouthpiece of the Morrígan that makes her incredibly powerful and, under the wrong influence, extremely dangerous.”

Just then Stiles’ phone lights up with a text from Scott, the soft buzzing against the stainless steel table startling him in the tense silence. He reads it but his eyes ball over the words five times before the meaning registers and his brain kicks into action.

_Something’s wrong. I can hear Lydia scream._

**Author's Note:**

> Soooooooo cliffhangers are a necessary evil but I do apologize :P
> 
> Let me know your thoughts please! I live for your comments XD


End file.
